Month: March 2020

A lot of us are spending more time at home this week, and while things are stressful, games are a great way to take your mind off of things. Thankfully, there are plenty of game deals floating around this week, including Best Buy’s regular weekly sale. This week’s deals include some pretty notable offers, including pre-order bundles for Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Doom Eternal; discounts on PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch games; and more.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is down to $40 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, an excellent deal on the action-adventure game. You’ll also find Assassin’s Creed: The Rebel Collection on sale for $30 on Nintendo Switch as well as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey for $15 on PS4 and Xbox One. The Outer Worlds, Obsidian’s 2019 sci-fi RPG, is also down to $35.

Of course, some of these deals can be found for cheaper elsewhere. While Control is on sale at Best Buy, you can find it even cheaper at Amazon–only $30–although it won’t be in stock for a few days. It’s a great time to pick up the paranormal action thriller, as the first Control DLC drops March 26 on PS4 and Xbox One. Mario & Sonic at the Olympics Tokyo 2020 for Nintendo Switch is cheaper at Amazon as well–the party game is selling for $35.

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While social distancing and self-quarantining may be a bit of a bummer–for the greater good–NBCUniversal has some pretty good news. As soon as Friday, March 20, you’ll be able to rent movies from the production company currently in theaters–or future releases on its release date–from the comfort of your own home.

On Monday, NBCUniversal made the announcement that movies under the Universal Pictures banner will be available on-demand of their theatrical release date, according to The Hollywood Reporter. This includes the April 10 release of Trolls: World Tour.

Movies like No Time To Die, A Quiet Place 2, and Universal’s F9 are seeing long delays because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and major cities are limiting the amount of people that can gather in one place, so the worldwide box office will take an immense hit. While theaters themselves will still suffer through this, the move to on-demand will help the global box office while also providing people who are social distancing some entertainment while stuck at home.

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Westworld is back for Season 3 on HBO! Lucy and Tamoor break down the plot, characters and key moments from the season premiere.

The Matrix 4 is in production. Well, it was until Warner Bros. decided to pull the plug on it because of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic that is currently underway.

The film had wrapped up shooting in San Francisco and was picking back up in Berlin, according to Variety. However, because of President Trump’s travel restrictions, WB executives felt that it was best to postpone shooting for the time being.

The film was set to release on May 21, 2021–the same day as John Wick: Chapter 4. It is unknown at this time as to when production will start back up and whether or not this stoppage will affect the release date of the movie.

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Core, the new game/creation tool hybrid coming from Manticore Games, allows players to craft, share, and play within custom worlds designed around different experiences. Core is well situated within an already growing space populated by other games like Fortnite, Dreams, and Minecraft. However, as a free-to-play game on PC, Core does things differently by focusing more on the experience of exploring different player worlds, tying into a more extensive network that is essentially a multiverse of unique player-created landscapes.

Out now in open alpha on PC, newcomers will be able to join the online community that the game has already formed during its closed alpha period, and take many of the player-creations for a test run, or dive into the mechanics head-on to push the limits of the system themselves. But what sets Core apart from games like Fortnite and Dreams is the level of flexibility to explore and experiment with the various constructs. When players dive into the game, they can just stick with one player’s level, such as a standard multiplayer deathmatch with other players set in custom created locales. However, if you want to switch things up without leaving the game, you can seamlessly hop over to different levels via an in-game portal, no matter how different they are.

Much like in games such as Dreams and LittleBigPlanet, you’ll be able to work within a robust level and map editor to design a variety of different spaces and retool various aspects of the core gameplay. In addition to using other player creations as a base, letting you get a grasp of the systems and go from there, you can also make a world from scratch and mold it into any type of experience you see fit. On a mechanic-level, Core feels most accustomed to the mechanics of a shooter, like Fortnite, but players will be able to reshape the game into something else entirely. Instead of being locked into one type of experience until you exit the game, you can portal hop over into a drastically different game and setting–akin to switching over to a different channel.

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Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox Series X arrives later this year, and the company has been gradually revealing new details about it in the lead up to its release. We’ve now learned a wealth of new information about the upcoming system in an Xbox Wire post and Digital Foundry report, including its official specifications and how its Quick Resume function will work. To help catch you up on all the details, we’ve rounded up everything new we’ve learned about Xbox Series X below.

Xbox Series X Full Specs Revealed

We’ve previously known some broad details about Xbox Series X’s hardware, but Microsoft has now revealed the console’s full specs. The system offers 12 teraflops of performance and boasts 16 GB of GDDR6 memory across a variable memory bus. It will also support two types of external memory, allowing you to expand SSD storage with a proprietary drive from Seagate or store games on an external HDD (much as you can with Xbox One).

• CPU: 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.8GHz (3.6GHz with SMT)
• GPU: 12 TFLOPs, 52 CUs at 1.825GHz, Custom RDNA 2
• Die Size: 360.45mm2
• Process: TSMC 7nm Enhanced
• Memory: 16GB GDDR6
• Memory Bandwidth: 10GB at 560GB/s, 6GB at 336GB/s
• Internal Storage: 1TB Custom NVMe SSD
• IO Throughput: 2.4GB/s (Raw), 4.8GB/s (Compressed)
• Expandable Storage: 1TB Expansion Card
• External Storage: USB 3.2 HDD Support
• Optical Drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive
• Performance Target: 4K at 60fps – up to 120fps

Quick Resume And Faster Loading

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